1.
Somerset House
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Somerset House is a large Neoclassical building situated on the south side of the Strand in central London, overlooking the River Thames, just east of Waterloo Bridge. The building, originally the site of a Tudor palace, was designed by Sir William Chambers in 1776, the East Wing forms part of the adjacent Strand campus of Kings College London. In the sixteenth century, the Strand, the bank of the Thames between the City of London and the Palace of Westminster was a favoured site for the mansions of the nobility. In 1539 Edward Seymour, 1st Earl of Hertford, obtained a grant of land at Chester Place, outside Temple Bar, when his nephew the boy-king Edward VI came to the throne in 1547, Seymour became Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector. Pauls Cathedral which were demolished partly at his behest as part of the ongoing Dissolution of the Monasteries and it was a two storey house built around a quadrangle with a gateway rising to three stories and was one of the earliest examples of Renaissance architecture in England. It is not known who designed the building, before it was finished, however, Somerset was overthrown, attainted by Parliament and in 1552 was executed on Tower Hill. Somerset Place then came into the possession of the Crown and his royal nephews half-sister the future Queen Elizabeth I lived there during the reign of her half-sister Queen Mary I. The process of completion and improvement was slow and costly, as late as 1598 Stow refers to it as yet unfinished. In the 17th century, the house was used as a residence by queens consort, during the reign of King James I, the building became the London residence of his wife, Anne of Denmark, and was renamed Denmark House. She commissioned a number of additions and improvements, some to designs by Inigo Jones. In particular, during the period between 1630 and 1635 he built a Chapel where Henrietta Maria of France, wife of King Charles I and this was in the care of the Capuchin Order and was on a site to the south-west of the Great Court. A small cemetery was attached and some of the tombstones are still to be built into one of the walls of a passage under the present quadrangle. Royal occupation of Somerset House was interrupted by the English Civil War and they failed to find a buyer, though a sale of the contents realised the very considerable sum of £118,000. Use was still found for it however, part of it served as an Army headquarters, General Fairfax being given official quarters there, lodgings were also provided for certain other Parliamentary notables. It was in Somerset House that Oliver Cromwells body lay in state after his death in 1658, however she returned to France in 1665 before it was finished. It was then used as a residence by Catherine of Braganza. During her time it received a certain notoriety as being, in the popular mind, Somerset House was refurbished by Sir Christopher Wren in 1685. After the Glorious Revolution in 1688, Somerset House entered on a period of decline, being used for grace
2.
Strand, London
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Strand is a major thoroughfare in the City of Westminster, Central London. The roads name comes from the Old English strond, meaning the edge of a river, the street was popular with the British upper classes between the 12th and 17th centuries, with many historically important mansions being built between the Strand and the river. These included Essex House, Arundel House, Somerset House, Savoy Palace, Durham House, the aristocracy moved to the West End over the 17th century, following which the Strand became well known for coffee shops, restaurants and taverns. The street was a point for theatre and music hall during the 19th century. At the east end of the street are two churches, St Mary le Strand and St Clement Danes. Several authors, poets and philosophers have lived on or near the Strand, including Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the street has been commemorated in the song Lets All Go Down the Strand, now recognised as a typical piece of Cockney music hall. The street is the link between the two cities of Westminster and London. It runs eastward from Trafalgar Square, parallel to the River Thames, traffic travelling eastbound follows a short crescent around Aldwych, connected at both ends to the Strand. The road marks the boundary of the Covent Garden district. The name was first recorded in 1002 as strondway, then in 1185 as Stronde and it is formed from the Old English word strond, meaning the edge of a river. Initially it referred to the bank of the once much wider Thames. The name was applied to the road itself. In the 13th century it was known as Densemanestret or street of the Danes, Strand Bridge was the name given to Waterloo Bridge during its construction, it was renamed for its official opening on the second anniversary of the coalition victory in the Battle of Waterloo. London Bus routes 6,23,139 and 176 all run along the Strand, as do numerous night bus services. During Roman Britain, what is now the Strand was part of the route to Silchester, known as Iter VIII on the Antonine Itinerary, and it was briefly part of a trading town called Lundenwic that developed around 600 AD, and stretched from Trafalgar Square to Aldwych. Alfred the Great gradually moved the settlement into the old Roman town of Londinium from around 886 AD onwards, leaving no mark of the old town, and the area returned to fields. In the Middle Ages, the Strand became the route between the separate settlements of the City of London and the royal Palace of Westminster. The landmark Eleanors Cross was built in the 13th century at the end of the Strand at Charing Cross by Edward I commemorating his wife Eleanor of Castile
3.
London
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London /ˈlʌndən/ is the capital and most populous city of England and the United Kingdom. Standing on the River Thames in the south east of the island of Great Britain and it was founded by the Romans, who named it Londinium. Londons ancient core, the City of London, largely retains its 1. 12-square-mile medieval boundaries. London is a global city in the arts, commerce, education, entertainment, fashion, finance, healthcare, media, professional services, research and development, tourism. It is crowned as the worlds largest financial centre and has the fifth- or sixth-largest metropolitan area GDP in the world, London is a world cultural capital. It is the worlds most-visited city as measured by international arrivals and has the worlds largest city airport system measured by passenger traffic, London is the worlds leading investment destination, hosting more international retailers and ultra high-net-worth individuals than any other city. Londons universities form the largest concentration of education institutes in Europe. In 2012, London became the first city to have hosted the modern Summer Olympic Games three times, London has a diverse range of people and cultures, and more than 300 languages are spoken in the region. Its estimated mid-2015 municipal population was 8,673,713, the largest of any city in the European Union, Londons urban area is the second most populous in the EU, after Paris, with 9,787,426 inhabitants at the 2011 census. The citys metropolitan area is the most populous in the EU with 13,879,757 inhabitants, the city-region therefore has a similar land area and population to that of the New York metropolitan area. London was the worlds most populous city from around 1831 to 1925, Other famous landmarks include Buckingham Palace, the London Eye, Piccadilly Circus, St Pauls Cathedral, Tower Bridge, Trafalgar Square, and The Shard. The London Underground is the oldest underground railway network in the world, the etymology of London is uncertain. It is an ancient name, found in sources from the 2nd century and it is recorded c.121 as Londinium, which points to Romano-British origin, and hand-written Roman tablets recovered in the city originating from AD 65/70-80 include the word Londinio. The earliest attempted explanation, now disregarded, is attributed to Geoffrey of Monmouth in Historia Regum Britanniae and this had it that the name originated from a supposed King Lud, who had allegedly taken over the city and named it Kaerlud. From 1898, it was accepted that the name was of Celtic origin and meant place belonging to a man called *Londinos. The ultimate difficulty lies in reconciling the Latin form Londinium with the modern Welsh Llundain, which should demand a form *lōndinion, from earlier *loundiniom. The possibility cannot be ruled out that the Welsh name was borrowed back in from English at a later date, and thus cannot be used as a basis from which to reconstruct the original name. Until 1889, the name London officially applied only to the City of London, two recent discoveries indicate probable very early settlements near the Thames in the London area
4.
WC postcode area
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The WC postcode area, also known as the London WC postcode area, is a group of postcode districts in central London, England. It includes parts of the London Borough of Camden, City of Westminster, London Borough of Islington, the area covered is of very high density development. The current postcode districts are relatively recent, divisions WC1 and WC2 districts established only in 1917. Where the districts are used for other than the sorting of mail, such as use as a geographic reference and on street signs. Both the WC1 and WC2 postcode districts are part of the London post town, there are no dependent localities used in the postcode districts. The numbered districts were created in 1917, before then they had been included in the WC postal district. There has been no significant recoding of the area from 1990 to 2007. There are Post Office branches in the WC1 postcode district at Grays Inn, High Holborn, Marchmont Street and Russell Square, the Western Central District Office was located on New Oxford Street, which was a stop on the London Post Office Railway. Deliveries for WC1 and WC2 now come from Mount Pleasant Mail Centre in Farringdon Road
5.
Geographic coordinate system
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A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system used in geography that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation, to specify a location on a two-dimensional map requires a map projection. The invention of a coordinate system is generally credited to Eratosthenes of Cyrene. Ptolemy credited him with the adoption of longitude and latitude. Ptolemys 2nd-century Geography used the prime meridian but measured latitude from the equator instead. Mathematical cartography resumed in Europe following Maximus Planudes recovery of Ptolemys text a little before 1300, in 1884, the United States hosted the International Meridian Conference, attended by representatives from twenty-five nations. Twenty-two of them agreed to adopt the longitude of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the Dominican Republic voted against the motion, while France and Brazil abstained. France adopted Greenwich Mean Time in place of local determinations by the Paris Observatory in 1911, the latitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle between the equatorial plane and the straight line that passes through that point and through the center of the Earth. Lines joining points of the same latitude trace circles on the surface of Earth called parallels, as they are parallel to the equator, the north pole is 90° N, the south pole is 90° S. The 0° parallel of latitude is designated the equator, the plane of all geographic coordinate systems. The equator divides the globe into Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the longitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle east or west of a reference meridian to another meridian that passes through that point. All meridians are halves of great ellipses, which converge at the north and south poles, the prime meridian determines the proper Eastern and Western Hemispheres, although maps often divide these hemispheres further west in order to keep the Old World on a single side. The antipodal meridian of Greenwich is both 180°W and 180°E, the combination of these two components specifies the position of any location on the surface of Earth, without consideration of altitude or depth. The grid formed by lines of latitude and longitude is known as a graticule, the origin/zero point of this system is located in the Gulf of Guinea about 625 km south of Tema, Ghana. To completely specify a location of a feature on, in, or above Earth. Earth is not a sphere, but a shape approximating a biaxial ellipsoid. It is nearly spherical, but has an equatorial bulge making the radius at the equator about 0. 3% larger than the radius measured through the poles, the shorter axis approximately coincides with the axis of rotation
6.
Ernst Vegelin
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Dr. Ernst Vegelin van Claerbergen is Head of the Courtauld Gallery, London. David Teniers and the theatre of painting, London, Courtauld Institute of Art,2006. ISBN9781903470497 Renoir at the theatre, looking at La loge, London, Courtauld Gallery in association with Paul Holberton Pub. ISBN9781903470732 Introduction to the Courtauld Gallery by Dr. Vegelin
7.
London Underground
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The London Underground is a public rapid transit system serving London and some parts of the adjacent counties of Buckinghamshire, Essex and Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom. The network has expanded to 11 lines, and in 2015–16 carried 1.34 billion passengers, the 11 lines collectively handle approximately 4.8 million passengers a day. The system has 270 stations and 250 miles of track, despite its name, only 45% of the system is actually underground in tunnels, with much of the network in the outer environs of London being on the surface. In addition, the Underground does not cover most southern parts of Greater London, the current operator, London Underground Limited, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Transport for London, the statutory corporation responsible for the transport network in Greater London. As of 2015, 92% of operational expenditure is covered by passenger fares, the Travelcard ticket was introduced in 1983 and Oyster, a contactless ticketing system, in 2003. Contactless card payments were introduced in 2014, the LPTB was a prominent patron of art and design, commissioning many new station buildings, posters and public artworks in a modernist style. Other famous London Underground branding includes the roundel and Johnston typeface, to prepare construction, a short test tunnel was built in 1855 in Kibblesworth, a small town with geological properties similar to London. This test tunnel was used for two years in the development of the first underground train, and was later, in 1861, the worlds first underground railway, it opened in January 1863 between Paddington and Farringdon using gas-lit wooden carriages hauled by steam locomotives. It was hailed as a success, carrying 38,000 passengers on the opening day, the Metropolitan District Railway opened in December 1868 from South Kensington to Westminster as part of a plan for an underground inner circle connecting Londons main-line termini. The Metropolitan and District railways completed the Circle line in 1884, built using the cut and this opened in 1890 with electric locomotives that hauled carriages with small opaque windows, nicknamed padded cells. The Waterloo and City Railway opened in 1898, followed by the Central London Railway in 1900, the Metropolitan Railway protested about the change of plan, but after arbitration by the Board of Trade, the DC system was adopted. When the Bakerloo was so named in July 1906, The Railway Magazine called it an undignified gutter title, by 1907 the District and Metropolitan Railways had electrified the underground sections of their lines. In January 1913, the UERL acquired the Central London Railway, the Bakerloo line was extended north to Queens Park to join a new electric line from Euston to Watford, but World War I delayed construction and trains reached Watford Junction in 1917. During air raids in 1915 people used the stations as shelters. An extension of the Central line west to Ealing was also delayed by the war, the Metropolitan promoted housing estates near the railway with the Metro-land brand and nine housing estates were built near stations on the line. Electrification was extended north from Harrow to Rickmansworth, and branches opened from Rickmansworth to Watford in 1925, the Piccadilly line was extended north to Cockfosters and took over District line branches to Harrow and Hounslow. In 1933, most of Londons underground railways, tramway and bus services were merged to form the London Passenger Transport Board, the Waterloo & City Railway, which was by then in the ownership of the main line Southern Railway, remained with its existing owners. In the same year that the London Passenger Transport Board was formed, in the following years, the outlying lines of the former Metropolitan Railway closed, the Brill Tramway in 1935, and the line from Quainton Road to Verney Junction in 1936
8.
Temple tube station
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Temple is a London Underground station located at Victoria Embankment in the City of Westminster, close to its boundary with the City of London. It is on the Circle and District lines between Embankment and Blackfriars, and is in fare zone 1, the definite article in the name fell out of use quite early. The Temple station was opened in the parish of St. Clement Danes on 30 May 1870 by the District Railway when the extended its line from Westminster to St. Pauls station. The construction of the new section of the DR was planned in conjunction with the building of the Victoria Embankment and was achieved by the cut and cover method of roofing over a shallow trench. On 1 February 1872, the DR opened a branch from its station at Earls Court to connect to the West London Extension Joint Railway which it connected to at Addison Road station. From that date the Outer Circle service began running over the DRs tracks, the service was operated jointly by the H&CR and the DR. On 30 June 1900, the Middle Circle service was withdrawn between Earls Court and Mansion House, at the beginning of the 20th century early plans for the Great Northern and Strand Railway included a proposal for the line to continue to Temple. The plan was rejected and the route was ended instead at the now closed Aldwych station, on 31 December 1908, the Outer Circle service was withdrawn from the DR tracks. In 1949, the Metropolitan line-operated Inner Circle route was given its own identity on the Tube map as the Circle line, London Buses night routes N550 and N551 serve the station. London Transport Museums Photographic Archive Ticket hall,1927 Station entrance,1934
9.
National Rail
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The name and the accompanying double arrow symbol are the intellectual property of the Secretary of State for Transport. The National Rail logo was introduced by ATOC in 1999, and was used on the Great Britain public timetable for the first time in the edition valid from 26 September in that year. Rules for its use are set out in the Corporate Identity Style Guidelines published by the Rail Delivery Group, the NR title is sometimes described as a brand. As it was used by British Rail, the operator before franchising, its use also maintains continuity and public familiarity. National Rail should not be confused with Network Rail, the two networks are generally coincident where passenger services are run. Most major Network Rail lines carry traffic and some lines are freight only. About twenty privately owned operating companies, each franchised for a defined term by government. The Rail Delivery Group is the association representing the TOCs and provides core services. It also runs Rail Settlement Plan, which allocates ticket revenue to the various TOCs, and Rail Staff Travel and it does not compile the national timetable, which is the joint responsibility of the Office of Rail Regulation and Network Rail. Since the privatisation of British Rail there is no longer a single approach to design on railways in Great Britain, the look and feel of signage, liveries and marketing material is largely the preserve of the individual TOCs. However, National Rail continues to use BRs famous double-arrow symbol and it has been incorporated in the National Rail logotype and is displayed on tickets, the National Rail website and other publicity. The trademark rights to the arrow symbol remain state-owned, being vested in the Secretary of State for Transport. The double arrow was already prescribed for indicating a railway station, the lettering used in the National Rail logotype is a modified form of the typeface Sassoon Bold. It is a misconception that Rail Alphabet was also used for printed material. The British Rail typefaces of choice from 1965 were Helvetica and Univers, TOCs may use what they like, examples include Futura, Helvetica, Frutiger, Bliss, and a modified version of Precious by London Midland. Several conurbations have their own metro or tram systems, most of which are not part of National Rail, LO now also possesses some infrastructure in its own right, following the reopening of the former East London line of London Underground as the East London Railway of LO. Heathrow Express and Eurostar are also not part of the National Rail network despite sharing of stations, northern Ireland Railways were never part of British Rail, which was always confined to Great Britain, and therefore are not part of the National Rail network. National Rail services have a common ticketing structure inherited from British Rail, through tickets are available between any pair of stations on the network, and can be bought from any station ticket office
10.
Charing Cross railway station
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Charing Cross railway station is a central London railway terminus on the Strand in the City of Westminster. It is the terminus of the South Eastern Main Line to Dover, all trains are operated by Southeastern, which provides the majority of commuter and regional services to south-east London and Kent. It is connected to Charing Cross tube station on the London Underground and it is one of 19 stations in the United Kingdom that are managed by Network Rail. Charing Cross is the 14th busiest station in the country, the tracks approach the station from Hungerford Bridge over the River Thames. There is an office and shopping complex above the station, known as Embankment Place, the original station building was built on the site of the Hungerford Market by the South Eastern Railway and opened on 11 January 1864. The station was designed by Sir John Hawkshaw, with a single wrought iron roof arching over the six platforms on its relatively cramped site. It is built on an arched viaduct, the level of the rails above the ground varying from 13 feet at the north-east end to 27 feet at the bridge abutment at the south-east end. A year later the Charing Cross Hotel, designed by Edward Middleton Barry, opened on 15 May 1865 and gave the station an ornate frontage in the French Renaissance style. Contemporary with the Charing Cross Hotel was a replica of the Eleanor Cross in Red Mansfield stone, also designed by Edward Middleton Barry and it was based on the original 13th-century Whitehall Cross that had been demolished in 1647. Distances in London are officially measured from the site of the cross, now the statue of Charles I facing Whitehall. The condition of the cross deteriorated until it was in such a condition that it was placed on the English Heritage At Risk Register in 2008. A ten-month project to repair and restore the cross was completed in August 2010. A 77-foot length of the elegant original roof structure, comprising the two end bays at the south of the station, and part of the wall collapsed at 3,45 pm on 5 December 1905. A gang of men were employed at the time in repairing, glazing and painting the section of roof which fell. Shortly after 3,30 pm, the roof emitted a loud noise, part of the roof began to sag and the western wall began to crack. It was another 12 minutes before the collapse occurred, which enabled trains and platforms to be evacuated, the roof, girders and debris fell across four passenger trains standing in platforms 3,4,5 and 6, blocking all tracks were. The part of the wall that fell had crashed through the wall and roof of the neighbouring Royal Avenue Theatre in Northumberland Avenue. At the Board Of Trade Inquiry into the accident, expert witnesses expressed doubts about the design of the roof, consequently, the South Eastern and Chatham Railway decided not to repair the roof but to replace it
11.
Art museum
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An art museum or art gallery is a building or space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art. Museums can be public or private, but what distinguishes a museum is the ownership of a collection, the term is used for both public galleries, which are non-profit or publicly owned museums that display selected collections of art. On the other hand, private galleries refers to the commercial enterprises for the sale of art, however, both types of gallery may host traveling exhibits or temporary exhibitions including art borrowed from elsewhere. In broad terms, in North American usage, the word gallery alone often implies a private gallery, the term contemporary art gallery refers usually to a privately owned for-profit commercial gallery. These galleries are found clustered together in large urban centers. Smaller cities are home to at least one gallery, but they may also be found in towns or villages. Contemporary art galleries are open to the general public without charge, however. They usually profit by taking a portion of art sales, from 25% to 50% is typical, there are also many non-profit or collective galleries. Some galleries in cities like Tokyo charge the artists a flat rate per day, curators often create group shows that say something about a certain theme, trend in art, or group of associated artists. Galleries sometimes choose to represent artists exclusively, giving them the opportunity to show regularly, a gallerys definition can also include the artist cooperative or artist-run space, which often operates as a space with a more democratic mission and selection process. A vanity gallery is an art gallery that charges fees from artists in order to show their work, the shows are not legitimately curated and will frequently or usually include as many artists as possible. Most art professionals are able to identify them on an artists resume, University art museums and galleries constitute collections of art that are developed, owned, and maintained by all kinds of schools, community colleges, colleges, and universities. This phenomenon exists in both the West and East, making it a global practice, although largely overlooked, there are over 700 university art museums in America alone. This number, in comparison to other kinds of art museums, throughout history, large and expensive works of art have generally been commissioned by religious institutions and monarchs and been displayed in temples, churches, and palaces. Although these collections of art were private, they were made available for viewing for a portion of the public. In classical times, religious institutions began to function as a form of art gallery. Wealthy Roman collectors of engraved gems and other precious objects often donated their collections to temples and it is unclear how easy it was in practice for the public to view these items. At the Palace of Versailles, entrance was restricted to wearing the proper apparel – the appropriate accessories could be hired from shops outside
12.
Courtauld Institute of Art
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The Courtauld Institute of Art, commonly referred to as The Courtauld, is a self-governing college of the University of London specialising in the study of the history of art and conservation. It is among the most prestigious institutions in the world for these disciplines and is known for the disproportionate number of directors of major museums drawn from its small body of alumni. The art collection of the Institute is known particularly for its French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings and is housed in the Courtauld Gallery, the Institute and the Gallery are both in Somerset House, in the Strand in London. Originally the Courtauld Institute was based in Home House, a Robert Adam-designed townhouse in Londons Portman Square, the Strand block of Somerset House, designed by William Chambers from 1775–1780, has housed the Courtauld Institute since 1989. The Courtauld celebrated its 75th anniversary during the 2007–08 academic year, the Courtauld Institute of Art is the major centre for the study of the history and conservation of art and architecture in the United Kingdom. It offers undergraduate and postgraduate teaching to around 400 students each year, degrees are awarded by the University of London. The Independent has called it probably the most prestigious specialist college for the study of the history of art in the world, the Courtauld was ranked, again, first in the United Kingdom for History and History of Art in The Guardian’s 2017 University Guide. The only undergraduate course offered by the Courtauld is a BA in the History of Art and this is a full-time course designed to introduce students to all aspects of the study of western art. Students in the history of art masters programme have to choose a specialisation ranging from antiquity to modern to global contemporary artwork. Special options are taught in class sizes of 5–10 students. In 2009, it was decided that the Witt Library would not continue to add new material to the collection, the book library is one of the UKs largest archives of art history books, periodicals and exhibition catalogues. There is a library which also covers films, and an IT suite. Two other websites and sell high resolution digital files to scholars, publishers and broadcasters, the Courtauld uses a virtual learning environment to deliver course material to its students. Since 2004, the Courtauld has published a research journal, immediations. Each cover of the journal has been commissioned by a contemporary artist. The art collection of the Institute is housed in the Courtauld Gallery, the collection was begun by the founder of the Institute, Samuel Courtauld, who presented an extensive collection of mainly French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in 1932. It was enhanced by further gifts in the 1930s and a bequest in 1948, the Gallery contains some 530 paintings and over 26,000 drawings and prints. The Courtauld Gallery is open to the public, since 1989 it has been housed in the Strand block of Somerset House, which was the first home of the Royal Academy, founded in 1768
13.
University of London
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The University of London is a collegiate research university located in London, England, consisting of 18 constituent colleges, nine research institutes and a number of central bodies. The university moved to a structure in 1900. The specialist colleges of the university include the London Business School, Imperial College London was formerly a member before leaving the university in 2007. City is the most recent constituent college, having joined on 1 September 2016, in post-nominals, the University of London is commonly abbreviated as Lond. or, more rarely, Londin. From the Latin Universitas Londiniensis, after its degree abbreviations, University College London was founded under the name London University in 1826 as a secular alternative to the religious universities of Oxford and Cambridge. In response to the controversy surrounding such educational establishment, Kings College London was founded and was the first to be granted a royal charter. Yet to receive a charter, UCL in 1834 renewed its application for a royal charter as a university. In response to this, opposition to exclusive rights grew among the London medical schools, the idea of a general degree awarding body for the schools was discussed in the medical press. And in evidence taken by the Select Committee on Medical Education, in 1835, the government announced the response to UCLs petition for a charter. Following the issuing of its charter on 28 November 1836, the university started drawing up regulations for degrees in March 1837. The death of William IV in June, however, resulted in a problem – the charter had been granted during our Royal will and pleasure, queen Victoria issued a second charter on 5 December 1837, reincorporating the university. The university awarded its first degrees in 1839, all to students from UCL, the university established by the charters of 1836 and 1837 was essentially an examining board with the right to award degrees in arts, laws and medicine. However, the university did not have the authority to grant degrees in theology, in medicine, the university was given the right to determine which medical schools provided sufficient medical training. Beyond the right to students for examination, there was no other connection between the affiliated colleges and the university. In 1849 the university held its first graduation ceremony at Somerset House following a petition to the senate from the graduates, about 250 students graduated at this ceremony. The London academic robes of this period were distinguished by their rich velvet facings, the list of affiliated colleges grew by 1858 to include over 50 institutions, including all other British universities. In that year, a new charter effectively abolished the affiliated colleges system by opening up the examinations to everyone whether they attended a college or not. The expanded role meant the university needed more space, particularly with the number of students at the provincial university colleges
14.
History of art
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The history of art is the history of any activity or product made by humans in a visual form for aesthetical or communicative purposes, expressing ideas, emotions or, in general, a worldview. The subsequent expansion of the list of arts in the 20th century reached to nine, architecture, dance, sculpture, music, painting, poetry, film, photography. The study of the history of art was developed during the Renaissance. Today, art enjoys a network of study, dissemination and preservation of all the artistic legacy of mankind throughout history. The rise of media has been crucial in improving the study, international events and exhibitions like the Whitney Biennial and biennales of Venice and São Paulo or the Documenta of Kassel have helped the development of new styles and trends. Institutions like UNESCO, with the establishment of the World Heritage Site lists, the field of art history was developed in the West, and originally dealt exclusively with European art history, with the High Renaissance as the defining standard. Gradually, over the course of the 20th century, a vision of art history has developed. This expanded version includes societies from across the globe, and it attempts to analyze artifacts in terms of the cultural values in which they were created. Thus, art history is now seen to all visual art. The history of art is often told as a chronology of masterpieces created in each civilization and it can thus be framed as a story of high culture, epitomized by the Wonders of the World. On the other hand, vernacular art expressions can also be integrated into art historical narratives, in the latter cases art objects may be referred to as archeological artifacts. One way to examine how art history is organized is by examining the major survey textbooks, information on canonical art history is also found in the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, which is sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The first tangible artifacts of human art that have found are from the Stone Age. During the Paleolithic, humans practiced hunting and gathering and lived in caves, in the Bronze Age, the first protohistoric civilizations arose. The Paleolithic had its first artistic manifestation in 25,000 BCE, the first traces of human-made objects appeared in southern Africa, the Western Mediterranean, Central and Eastern Europe, Siberia, India and Australia. These first traces are generally worked stone, wood or bone tools, to paint in red, iron oxide was used, in black, manganese oxide and in ochre, clay. Surviving art from this period includes small carvings in stone or bone, cave paintings have been found in the Franco-Cantabrian region. There are pictures with magical-religious character and also pictures with a naturalistic sense, sculpture is represented by the so-called Venus figurines, feminine figures which were probably used in fertility cults, such as the Venus of Willendorf
15.
Impressionism
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Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s. The Impressionists faced harsh opposition from the art community in France. The development of Impressionism in the arts was soon followed by analogous styles in other media that became known as impressionist music. Radicals in their time, early Impressionists violated the rules of academic painting and they constructed their pictures from freely brushed colours that took precedence over lines and contours, following the example of painters such as Eugène Delacroix and J. M. W. Turner. They also painted scenes of modern life, and often painted outdoors. Previously, still lifes and portraits as well as landscapes were painted in a studio. The Impressionists found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting en plein air, the Impressionists, however, developed new techniques specific to the style. The public, at first hostile, gradually came to believe that the Impressionists had captured a fresh and original vision, even if the art critics and art establishment disapproved of the new style. In the middle of the 19th century—a time of change, as Emperor Napoleon III rebuilt Paris, the Académie was the preserver of traditional French painting standards of content and style. Historical subjects, religious themes, and portraits were valued, landscape, the Académie preferred carefully finished images that looked realistic when examined closely. Paintings in this style were made up of brush strokes carefully blended to hide the artists hand in the work. Colour was restrained and often toned down further by the application of a golden varnish, the Académie had an annual, juried art show, the Salon de Paris, and artists whose work was displayed in the show won prizes, garnered commissions, and enhanced their prestige. The standards of the juries represented the values of the Académie, represented by the works of artists as Jean-Léon Gérôme. In the early 1860s, four young painters—Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and they discovered that they shared an interest in painting landscape and contemporary life rather than historical or mythological scenes. A favourite meeting place for the artists was the Café Guerbois on Avenue de Clichy in Paris, where the discussions were led by Édouard Manet. They were soon joined by Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, during the 1860s, the Salon jury routinely rejected about half of the works submitted by Monet and his friends in favour of works by artists faithful to the approved style. In 1863, the Salon jury rejected Manets The Luncheon on the Grass primarily because it depicted a woman with two clothed men at a picnic. While the Salon jury routinely accepted nudes in historical and allegorical paintings, the jurys severely worded rejection of Manets painting appalled his admirers, and the unusually large number of rejected works that year perturbed many French artists
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Post-Impressionism
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Post-Impressionism is a predominantly French art movement that developed roughly between 1886 and 1905, from the last Impressionist exhibition to the birth of Fauvism. Post-Impressionism emerged as a reaction against Impressionists concern for the depiction of light. The movement was led by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, the term Post-Impressionism was first used by art critic Roger Fry in 1906. Three weeks later, Roger Fry used the term again when he organized the 1910 exhibition, Manet, the Post-Impressionists were dissatisfied with what they felt was the triviality of subject matter and the loss of structure in Impressionist paintings, though they did not agree on the way forward. Georges Seurat and his followers concerned themselves with Pointillism, the use of tiny dots of colour. Paul Cézanne set out to restore a sense of order and structure to painting, to make of Impressionism something solid and durable and he achieved this by reducing objects to their basic shapes while retaining the saturated colours of Impressionism. The Impressionist Camille Pissarro experimented with Neo-Impressionist ideas between the mid-1880s and the early 1890s, Vincent van Gogh used colour and vibrant swirling brush strokes to convey his feelings and his state of mind. Although they often exhibited together, Post-Impressionist artists were not in agreement concerning a cohesive movement, yet, the abstract concerns of harmony and structural arrangement, in the work of all these artists, took precedence over naturalism. Artists such as Seurat adopted a scientific approach to colour. Younger painters during the early 20th century worked in geographically disparate regions and in various categories, such as Fauvism and Cubism. Most of the artists in Frys exhibition were younger than the Impressionists, Fry later explained, For purposes of convenience, it was necessary to give these artists a name, and I chose, as being the vaguest and most non-committal, the name of Post-Impressionism. This merely stated their position in time relatively to the Impressionist movement, john Rewald limited the scope to the years between 1886 and 1892 in his pioneering publication on Post-Impressionism, From Van Gogh to Gauguin. This volume would extend the period covered to other artistic movements derived from Impressionism, though confined to the late 19th, Rewald focused on such outstanding early Post-Impressionists active in France as van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, and Redon. Pont-Aven School, implying more than that the artists involved had been working for a while in Pont-Aven or elsewhere in Brittany. Symbolism, a highly welcomed by vanguard critics in 1891. Rewald wrote that the term Post-Impressionism is not a precise one. Convenient, when the term is by definition limited to French visual arts derived from Impressionism since 1886, rewalds approach to historical data was narrative rather than analytic, and beyond this point he believed it would be sufficient to let the sources speak for themselves. Rival terms like Modernism or Symbolism were never as easy to handle, for they covered literature, architecture and other arts as well, Symbolism, however, is considered to be a concept which emerged a century later in France, and implied an individual approach
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Samuel Courtauld (art collector)
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Samuel Courtauld was an English industrialist who is best remembered as an art collector. He founded the Courtauld Institute of Art in London in 1932 and, after a series of gifts during the 1930s, Samuel Courtauld took charge of the firm from 1908 as general manager and as chairman from 1921 to 1946. Courtauld was the son of Sydney Courtauld and Sarah Lucy Sharpe, and he was educated at Rugby School. After he finished school he went to Germany and France and studied textile technology to prepare to work in the family business, in 1901, he became director of one of the factories, then in 1908 the CEO of all plants of the company. He became interested in art after seeing the Hugh Lane collection on exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1917, however, his career as a collector started in 1922 following an exhibition of French art at the Burlington Fine Arts Club. Courtauld was one of the first collectors to display interest in French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, during the 1920s, he assembled an extensive collection including masterpieces by Vincent van Gogh or previously owned by Anna Boch, Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The core elements of his collection were accumulated between 1926 and 1930, though his passion dwindled somewhat following the death of his wife Elizabeth in 1931, Samuel founded the Courtauld Institute with Viscount Lee of Fareham and Sir Robert Witt in 1930. Courtauld provided the bulk of the money for the founding of the Courtauld Institute and his wealth came from the textile business, but on both sides of his family there were connections with the arts and traditions of patronage going back several generations. Courtauld loved pictures and wrote poems about them and his example was emulated by his younger brother Stephen, who converted the medieval ruins of Eltham Palace into an Art Deco mansion. In the event the Portman Square house was to be the home for almost sixty years. Courtauld also created a £50,000 acquisition fund for the Tate and National galleries, Samuel Courtauld married Elizabeth Theresa Frances Kelsey on 20 June 1901. The children from this marriage included, Sydney Courtauld married the politician Rab Butler, Samuels younger brother, Stephen Courtauld, was also an arts patron and is remembered for his work on restoring Eltham Palace. Augustine Courtauld Samuels cousin was an explorer, noted for his observations of the climate of the ice cap of Greenland
18.
Arthur Lee, 1st Viscount Lee of Fareham
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Arthur Hamilton Lee, 1st Viscount Lee of Fareham, GCB, GCSI, GBE, PC was an English soldier, diplomat, politician, philanthropist and patron of the arts. After military postings and an assignment to the British Embassy in Washington and he entered politics, was first elected in 1900, and later served as Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries and First Lord of the Admiralty following the First World War. He donated his house, Chequers, to the nation as a retreat for the Prime Minister. Arthur Hamilton Lee was born at The Rectory, Bridport, Dorset in 1868 and his father was rector of the towns Anglican St. Marys Church. He was a grandson of Sir John Theophilus Lee, who as a midshipman was present at the Battle of the Nile, after attending Cheltenham College, Lee entered the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. He was commissioned into the Royal Artillery as a lieutenant on 17 February 1888. He was posted to the Far East -- China—as Adjutant of the Royal Hong Kong Regiment and he was promoted lieutenant on 18 February 1891. He returned to England in 1891, and was stationed on the Isle of Wight for the two years. On 18 August 1893, at the age of 24, Lee became a professor of Strategy and Tactics, at the Royal Military College of Canada, in Kingston, Ontario, with the local rank of captain. Since only 11 to 30 cadets annually entered the College in those days, Lee would have instructed only about 140 cadets in his five years at the College,433, future Major General Thomas Victor Anderson, D. S. O. He enjoyed riding and walking in winter across the ice to Wolfe Island and he was a regular attendant at St. Georges Cathedral to hear Dean Buxton Smith. Became RMC Commandant in 1897, Captain Lee came to live with the Kitsons in the Commandants residence, in 1894, Lee initiated a Military Survey of the Canadian Frontier, and supervised its progress until its completion in 1896. During the summer of 1897 he was a Special Correspondent for the London Daily Chronicle, covering the earlier stages of the Klondike Gold Rush, based on his travels to Alaska, in 1900, when Lee resigned as British Military Attaché in Washington, D. C. Colonel Kitson resigned as Commandant of RMC to take over the Washington post vacated by Lee and he did not receive substantive promotion until the completion of his RMC appointment on 18 April 1898. He became the British military attaché with the United States Army in Cuba during the Spanish–American War and he received the U. S. campaign medal, was made an honorary member of the 1st U. S. Volunteer Cavalry—the famous Roosevelts Rough Riders—and met Theodore Roosevelt, on 28 January 1899 Lee, who was still not 30 years old, was appointed military attaché at the British Embassy in Washington, with the temporary rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Although he would have preferred to have been on service in South Africa, since the Boer War had just started. On 23 December 1899, Lee married Ruth Moore, daughter of New York banker John Godfrey Moore and he had first met Ruth Moore at parties in Kingston and Gananoque, and had taken her to balls at the Royal Military College, Kingston
19.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir, commonly known as Auguste Renoir, was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty and especially feminine sensuality, it has said that Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau. He was the father of actor Pierre Renoir, filmmaker Jean Renoir and he was the grandfather of the filmmaker Claude Renoir, son of Pierre. Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France, in 1841 and his father, Léonard Renoir, was a tailor of modest means, so in 1844, Renoirs family moved to Paris in search of more favorable prospects. The location of their home, in rue d’Argenteuil in central Paris, although the young Renoir had a natural proclivity for drawing, he exhibited a greater talent for singing. His talent was encouraged by his teacher, Charles Gounod, who was the choir-master at the Church of St Roch at the time. However, due to the financial circumstances, Renoir had to discontinue his music lessons. Although Renoir displayed a talent for his work, he tired of the subject matter. The owner of the factory recognized his apprentice’s talent and communicated this to Renoir’s family, following this, Renoir started taking lessons to prepare for entry into Ecole des Beaux Arts. When the porcelain factory adopted mechanical reproduction processes in 1858, Renoir was forced to other means to support his learning. Before he enrolled in art school, he also painted hangings for overseas missionaries, in 1862, he began studying art under Charles Gleyre in Paris. There he met Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, and Claude Monet, at times, during the 1860s, he did not have enough money to buy paint. Renoir had his first success at the Salon of 1868 with his painting Lise with a Parasol, although Renoir first started exhibiting paintings at the Paris Salon in 1864, recognition was slow in coming, partly as a result of the turmoil of the Franco-Prussian War. This loss of a favorite painting location resulted in a change of subjects. Renoir was inspired by the style and subject matter of modern painters Camille Pissarro. Although the critical response to the exhibition was largely unfavorable, Renoirs work was well received. That same year, two of his works were shown with Durand-Ruel in London, hoping to secure a livelihood by attracting portrait commissions, Renoir displayed mostly portraits at the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876. He contributed a diverse range of paintings the next year when the group presented its third exhibition, they included Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette
20.
Claude Monet
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Monets ambition of documenting the French countryside led him to adopt a method of painting the same scene many times in order to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons. From 1883 Monet lived in Giverny, where he purchased a house and property, Claude Monet was born on 14 November 1840 on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. He was the son of Claude Adolphe Monet and Louise Justine Aubrée Monet. On 20 May 1841, he was baptized in the parish church, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, as Oscar-Claude. Despite being baptized Catholic, Monet later became an atheist, in 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. His father wanted him to go into the familys ship-chandling and grocery business and his mother was a singer, and supported Monets desire for a career in art. On 1 April 1851, Monet entered Le Havre secondary school of the arts, locals knew him well for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for ten to twenty francs. Monet also undertook his first drawing lessons from Jacques-François Ochard, a student of Jacques-Louis David. On the beaches of Normandy around 1856 he met fellow artist Eugène Boudin, Boudin taught Monet en plein air techniques for painting. Both received the influence of Johan Barthold Jongkind, on 28 January 1857, his mother died. At the age of sixteen, he left school and went to live with his widowed, childless aunt, when Monet traveled to Paris to visit the Louvre, he witnessed painters copying from the old masters. Having brought his paints and other tools with him, he would go and sit by a window. Monet was in Paris for several years and met other painters, including Édouard Manet and others who would become friends. After drawing a low number in March 1861, Monet was drafted into the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry in Algeria for a seven-year period of military service. His prosperous father could have purchased Monets exemption from conscription but declined to do so when his son refused to give up painting. While in Algeria Monet did only a few sketches of scenes, a single landscape. In a Le Temps interview of 1900 however he commented that the light, after about a year of garrison duty in Algiers, Monet contracted typhoid fever and briefly went absent without leave. Following convalescence, Monets aunt intervened to get him out of the army if he agreed to complete a course at an art school and it is possible that the Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind, whom Monet knew, may have prompted his aunt on this matter
21.
Camille Pissarro
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Camille Pissarro was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas. His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, Pissarro studied from great forerunners, including Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He later studied and worked alongside Georges Seurat and Paul Signac when he took on the Neo-Impressionist style at the age of 54, in 1873 he helped establish a collective society of fifteen aspiring artists, becoming the pivotal figure in holding the group together and encouraging the other members. Cézanne said he was a father for me, a man to consult and a little like the good Lord, and he was also one of Gauguins masters. Renoir referred to his work as revolutionary, through his portrayals of the common man. Pissarro is the only artist to have shown his work at all eight Paris Impressionist exhibitions and he acted as a father figure not only to the Impressionists but to all four of the major Post-Impressionists, including Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro was born on 10 July 1830 on the island of St. Thomas to Frederick and his father was of Portuguese Jewish descent and held French nationality. His mother was from a French-Jewish family from the island of St. Thomas and his father was a merchant who came to the island from France to deal with the hardware store of a deceased uncle and married his widow. The marriage caused a stir within St. Thomas small Jewish community because she was married to Fredericks uncle. In subsequent years his four children were forced to attend the primary school. Upon his death, his will specified that his estate be split equally between the synagogue and St. Thomas Protestant church, when Camille was twelve his father sent him to boarding school in France. He studied at the Savary Academy in Passy near Paris, while a young student, he developed an early appreciation of the French art masters. Monsieur Savary himself gave him a grounding in drawing and painting and suggested he draw from nature when he returned to St. Thomas. However, his father preferred he work in his business, giving him a job working as a cargo clerk and he took every opportunity during those next five years at the job to practise drawing during breaks and after work. When he turned twenty-one, Danish artist Fritz Melbye, then living on St. Thomas, inspired Pissarro to take on painting as a profession, becoming his teacher. Pissarro then chose to leave his family and job and live in Venezuela and he drew everything he could, including landscapes, village scenes, and numerous sketches, enough to fill up multiple sketchbooks. In 1855 he moved back to Paris where he working as assistant to Anton Melbye. In Paris he worked as assistant to Danish painter Anton Melbye and he also studied paintings by other artists whose style impressed him, Courbet, Charles-François Daubigny, Jean-François Millet, and Corot
22.
Edgar Degas
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Edgar Degas was a French artist famous for his paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings. He is especially identified with the subject of dance, more than half of his works depict dancers and he is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism, although he rejected the term, preferring to be called a realist. He was a draftsman, and particularly masterly in depicting movement, as can be seen in his rendition of dancers, racecourse subjects. His portraits are notable for their complexity and for their portrayal of human isolation. At the beginning of his career, Degas wanted to be a history painter, in his early thirties, he changed course, and by bringing the traditional methods of a history painter to bear on contemporary subject matter, he became a classical painter of modern life. Degas was born in Paris, France, into a wealthy family. He was the oldest of five children of Célestine Musson De Gas, a Creole from New Orleans, Louisiana, and Augustin De Gas and his maternal grandfather Germain Musson, was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti of French descent and had settled in New Orleans in 1810. Degas began his schooling at age eleven, enrolling in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and his mother died when he was thirteen, and his father and grandfather became the main influences on him for the remainder of his youth. Degas began to paint early in life, by the time he graduated from the Lycée with a baccalauréat in literature in 1853, at age 18, he had turned a room in his home into an artists studio. Upon graduating, he registered as a copyist in The Louvre Museum, Degas duly enrolled at the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris in November 1853, but applied little effort to his studies. In April of that year Degas was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts and he studied drawing there with Louis Lamothe, under whose guidance he flourished, following the style of Ingres. In July 1856, Degas traveled to Italy, where he would remain for the three years. In 1858, while staying with his aunts family in Naples and he also began work on several history paintings, Alexander and Bucephalus and The Daughter of Jephthah in 1859–60, Sémiramis Building Babylon in 1860, and Young Spartans around 1860. In 1861 Degas visited his childhood friend Paul Valpinçon in Normandy and he exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1865, when the jury accepted his painting Scene of War in the Middle Ages, which attracted little attention. The change in his art was influenced primarily by the example of Édouard Manet, upon the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Degas enlisted in the National Guard, where his defense of Paris left him little time for painting. During rifle training his eyesight was found to be defective, after the war, Degas began in 1872 an extended stay in New Orleans, Louisiana, where his brother René and a number of other relatives lived. Staying at the home of his Creole uncle, Michel Musson, on Esplanade Avenue, Degas produced a number of works, many depicting family members. One of Degass New Orleans works, A Cotton Office in New Orleans, garnered favorable attention back in France, Degas returned to Paris in 1873 and his father died the following year, whereupon Degas learned that his brother René had amassed enormous business debts
23.
Vincent van Gogh
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Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings and his suicide at 37 followed years of mental illness and poverty. Born into a family, Van Gogh drew as a child and was serious, quiet. As a young man he worked as an art dealer, often travelling and he turned to religion, and spent time as a Protestant missionary in southern Belgium. He drifted in ill health and solitude before taking up painting in 1881 and his younger brother Theo supported him financially, and the two kept up a long correspondence by letter. His early works, mostly still lifes and depictions of peasant labourers, in 1886 he moved to Paris, where he met members of the avant-garde, including Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin, who were reacting against the Impressionist sensibility. As his work developed he created a new approach to still lifes and his paintings grew brighter in colour as he developed a style that became fully realised during his stay in Arles in the south of France in 1888. During this period he broadened his subject matter to include trees, cypresses, wheat fields. Van Gogh suffered from episodes and delusions and though he worried about his mental stability, he often neglected his physical health, did not eat properly. His friendship with Gauguin ended after a confrontation with a razor and he spent time in psychiatric hospitals, including a period at Saint-Rémy. After he discharged himself and moved to the Auberge Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris and his depression continued and on 27 July 1890, Van Gogh shot himself in the chest with a revolver. He died from his injuries two days later, Van Gogh was unsuccessful during his lifetime, and was considered a madman and a failure. He became famous after his suicide, and exists in the imagination as the quintessential misunderstood genius. His reputation began to grow in the early 20th century as elements of his style came to be incorporated by the Fauves. The most comprehensive source on Van Gogh is the correspondence between him and his younger brother, Theo. Their lifelong friendship, and most of what is known of Vincents thoughts, Theo van Gogh was an art dealer and provided his brother with financial and emotional support, and access to influential people on the contemporary art scene. Theo kept all of Vincents letters to him, Vincent kept few of the letters he received, after both had died, Theos widow Johanna arranged for the publication of some of their letters. A few appeared in 1906 and 1913, the majority were published in 1914, Vincents letters are eloquent and expressive and have been described as having a diary-like intimacy, and read in parts like autobiography
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Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear
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Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear is a 1889 self-portrait by Dutch, Post-Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh. In this self-portrait, Van Gogh is shown wearing a cap with black fur. He is in a traditional view, and his forward gaze falls slightly to the right. Behind him is a window, assumedly letting in a winter breeze. This woodblock print has been identified as a Geishas in a Landscape published by Sato Tokyo and this shows an important influence of Japonism and wood block print on Van Gogh’s work, which also appear in the background of other portraits he had created. The painting is composed of impasto strokes, mostly in a vertical pattern and this creates a texture, which comes up off the canvas and adds dimension to the flat surface. The skin tone is muted with green and yellowish tones, the bandage covering Van Gogh’s ear in this painting alludes to his most famous conflict. Van Gogh used a mirror for his self-portraits which is why some mistakenly think that he lost part of his right ear instead of his left, Van Gogh moved from Paris to Arles in hopes of creating a community for artists to exist in mutual supportiveness and encouragement. He invited Paul Gauguin, an artist whom he had befriended in Paris and they proved to be a disagreeable pair and quarreled often, sometimes violently. The evening of December 23,1888 during one of their arguments, Van Gogh had a seizure during which he threatened Gauguin with a razor, but then injured himself, severing part of his left ear. In a state of excitement, he brought the dismembered lobe to the Maison de Tolérance bordello where he presented it to a prostitute named Rachel. When Gauguin returned the morning he discovered that the police had arrived at the house. Van Gogh had severed an artery in his neck, and was in health after losing so much blood. He was removed to the hospital, and he confessed to having no recollection of what happened during this fit, throughout his life, Van Gogh continued to suffer from similar fits, sometimes characterized by acute paranoia. At the time of Van Gogh’s death, this painting was in the possession of Père Tanguy, Tanguy had posed twice for Van Gogh in 1887. It was exhibited in Paris 1901 and 1905 in a major Van Gogh retrospective, in 1928 Samuel Courtauld purchased it. It is currently located in The Courtauld Gallery in London, UK, some critics dismiss this painting as a fake or crude pastiche. By January 17,1889 Vincent had written to his brother Theo mentioning he had completed “another new self portrait. ”Confusion has arisen over whether this was in reference to Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear, or Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe
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Paul Gauguin
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Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a French post-Impressionist artist. Underappreciated until after his death, Gauguin is now recognized for his use of color. His work was influential to the French avant-garde and many artists, such as Pablo Picasso. Many of his paintings were in the possession of Russian collector Sergei Shchukin and he was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, and writer. He was also a proponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms. Gauguin was born in Paris, France to Clovis Gauguin and Alina Maria Chazal on June 7,1848 and his birth coincided with revolutionary upheavals throughout Europe that year. His father, a 34-year-old liberal journalist, came from a family of petit-bourgeoisie entrepreneurs residing in Orléans and he was compelled to flee France when the newspaper for which he wrote was suppressed by French authorities. Gauguins mother, the 22-year-old Aline Marie Chazal, was the daughter of Andre Chazal, an engraver, and Flora Tristan and their union ended when Andre assaulted his wife Flora and was sentenced to prison for attempted murder. Paul Gauguins maternal grandmother, Flora Tristan, was the daughter of Thérèse Laisnay. Details of Thérèses family background are not known, her father, Don Mariano, was a Spanish nobleman, members of the wealthy Tristan Moscoso family held powerful positions in Peru. Nonetheless, Don Marianos unexpected death plunged his mistress and daughter Flora into poverty, when Floras marriage with Andre failed, she petitioned for and obtained a small monetary settlement from her fathers Peruvian relatives. She sailed to Peru in hopes of enlarging her share of the Tristan Moscoso family fortune and this never materialized, but she successfully published a popular travelogue of her experiences in Peru which launched her literary career in 1838. An active supporter of early socialist societies, Gauguins maternal grandmother helped to lay the foundations for the 1848 revolutionary movements, placed under surveillance by French police and suffering from overwork, she died in 1844. Her grandson Paul idolized his grandmother, and kept copies of her books with him to the end of his life. In 1850, Clovis Gauguin departed for Peru with his wife Alina and he died of a heart attack en route, and Alina arrived in Peru a widow with the 18-month-old Paul and his 2 ½ year-old sister, Marie. Gauguins mother was welcomed by her granduncle, whose son-in-law would shortly assume the presidency of Peru. To the age of six, Paul enjoyed an upbringing, attended by nursemaids. He retained a vivid memory of period of his childhood which instilled indelible impressions of Peru that haunted him the rest of his life
26.
Georges Seurat
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Georges-Pierre Seurat was a French post-Impressionist painter and draftsman. He is noted for his use of drawing media and for devising the painting techniques known as chromoluminarism and pointillism. His large-scale work, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, altered the direction of art by initiating Neo-impressionism. Seurat was born 2 December 1859 in Paris, at 60 rue de Bondy, the Seurat family moved to 136 boulevard de Magenta in 1862 or 1863. His father, Antoine Chrysostome Seurat, originally from Champagne, was a legal official who had become wealthy from speculating in property. Georges had a brother, Émile Augustin, and a sister, Marie-Berthe and his father lived in Le Raincy and visited his wife and children once a week at boulevard de Magenta. Georges Seurat first studied art at the École Municipale de Sculpture et Dessin, near his familys home in the boulevard Magenta, Seurats studies resulted in a well-considered and fertile theory of contrasts, a theory to which all his work was thereafter subjected. His formal artistic education came to an end in November 1879, after a year at the Brest Military Academy, he returned to Paris where he shared a studio with his friend Aman-Jean, while also renting a small apartment at 16 rue de Chabrol. For the next two years, he worked at mastering the art of monochrome drawing and his first exhibited work, shown at the Salon, of 1883, was a Conté crayon drawing of Aman-Jean. He also studied the works of Eugène Delacroix carefully, making notes on his use of color and he spent 1883 working on his first major painting—a large canvas titled Bathers at Asnières, a monumental work showing young men relaxing by the Seine in a working-class suburb of Paris. Seurat also departed from the Impressionist ideal by preparing for the work with a number of drawings, Bathers at Asnières was rejected by the Paris Salon, and instead he showed it at the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants in May 1884. Seurats new ideas on pointillism were to have a strong influence on Signac. In the summer of 1884, Seurat began work on A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, the painting shows members of each of the social classes participating in various park activities. The tiny juxtaposed dots of multi-colored paint allow the eye to blend colors optically. It took Seurat two years to complete this 10-foot-wide painting, much of which he spent in the park sketching in preparation for the work and it is now in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The painting was the inspiration for James Lapine and Stephen Sondheims musical, Seurat concealed his relationship with Madeleine Knobloch, an artists model whom he portrayed in his painting Jeune femme se poudrant. In 1889 she moved in with Seurat in his studio on the 7th floor of 128bis Boulevard de Clichy, when Madeleine became pregnant, the couple moved to a studio at 39 passage de lÉlysée-des-Beaux-Arts. There she gave birth to their son, who was named Pierre-Georges,16 February 1890, Seurat died in Paris in his parents home on 29 March 1891 at the age of 31
27.
Henri Rousseau
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Henri Julien Félix Rousseau was a French post-impressionist painter in the Naïve or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier, a description of his occupation as a toll collector. Ridiculed during his lifetime by critics, he came to be recognized as a genius whose works are of high artistic quality. Rousseaus work exerted an influence on several generations of avant-garde artists. Rousseau was born in Laval, France, in 1844 into the family of a plumber, he was forced to work there as a small boy. He attended Laval High School as a day student, and then as a boarder after his father became a debtor, though mediocre in some of his high school subjects, Rousseau won prizes for drawing and music. After high school, he worked for a lawyer and studied law and he served four years, starting in 1863. With his fathers death, Rousseau moved to Paris in 1868 to support his mother as a government employee. In 1868, he married Clémence Boitard, his landlords 15-year-old daughter, in 1871, he was appointed as a collector of the octroi of Paris, collecting taxes on goods entering Paris. His wife died in 1888 and he married Josephine Noury in 1898 and he started painting seriously in his early forties, by age 49, he retired from his job to work on his art full-time. Rousseau claimed he had no other than nature, although he admitted he had received some advice from two established Academic painters, Félix Auguste Clément and Jean-Léon Gérôme. Essentially, he was self-taught and is considered to be a naïve or primitive painter and his best-known paintings depict jungle scenes, even though he never left France or saw a jungle. Stories spread by admirers that his service included the French expeditionary force to Mexico are unfounded. His inspiration came from illustrations in books and the botanical gardens in Paris. He had also met soldiers during his term of service who had survived the French expedition to Mexico, along with his exotic scenes there was a concurrent output of smaller topographical images of the city and its suburbs. Rousseaus flat, seemingly childish style was disparaged by many critics and his ingenuousness was extreme, and he always aspired, in vain, to conventional acceptance. Many observers commented that he painted like a child, but the work shows sophistication with his particular technique, from 1886, he exhibited regularly in the Salon des Indépendants, and, although his work was not placed prominently, it drew an increasing following over the years. Yet it was more than a decade before Rousseau returned to depicting his vision of jungles, in 1893, Rousseau moved to a studio in Montparnasse where he lived and worked until his death in 1910
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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
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Toulouse-Lautrec is among the best-known painters of the Post-Impressionist period, with Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin. In a 2005 auction at Christies auction house, La Blanchisseuse, his painting of a young laundress, sold for US$22.4 million. The last part of his name means he was a member of an aristocratic family and his younger brother was born in 1867, but died the following year. After the death of his brother, Henris parents separated and a nanny ended up taking care of him, at the age of eight, Henri went to live with his mother in Paris where he drew sketches and caricatures in his exercise workbooks. The family quickly realised that Henris talents lay in drawing and painting, a friend of his father, René Princeteau, visited sometimes to give informal lessons. Some of Henris early paintings are of horses, a speciality of Princeteau, in 1875, Toulouse-Lautrec returned to Albi because his mother had concerns about his health. He took thermal baths at Amélie-les-Bains and his mother consulted doctors in the hope of finding a way to improve her sons growth, Toulouse-Lautrecs parents, the Comte and Comtesse, were first cousins, and he suffered from congenital health conditions sometimes attributed to a family history of inbreeding. At age 13, Toulouse-Lautrec fractured his right femur, at age 14, he fractured his left. The breaks did not heal properly, modern physicians attribute this to an unknown genetic disorder, possibly pycnodysostosis, or a variant disorder along the lines of osteopetrosis, achondroplasia, or osteogenesis imperfecta. Rickets aggravated by praecox virilism has also been suggested, afterwards, his legs ceased to grow, so that as an adult he was extremely short. He developed an adult-sized torso, while retaining his child-sized legs, additionally, he is reported to have had hypertrophied genitals. Physically unable to participate in many activities enjoyed by males his age and he became an important Post-Impressionist painter, art nouveau illustrator, and lithographer, and, through his works, recorded many details of the late-19th-century bohemian lifestyle in Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec contributed a number of illustrations to the magazine Le Rire during the mid-1890s, after initially failing college entrance exams, he passed his second attempt and completed his studies. Toulouse-Lautrecs mother had high ambitions and, with the aim of her son becoming a fashionable and respected painter and he was drawn to Montmartre, the area of Paris famous for its bohemian lifestyle and the haunt of artists, writers, and philosophers. Studying with Bonnat placed Toulouse-Lautrec in the heart of Montmartre, an area he rarely left over the next 20 years. After Bonnat took a new job, Toulouse-Lautrec moved to the studio of Fernand Cormon in 1882 and studied for a five years. At this time he met Émile Bernard and Vincent van Gogh, Cormon, whose instruction was more relaxed than Bonnats, allowed his pupils to roam Paris, looking for subjects to paint. During this period, Toulouse-Lautrec had his first encounter with a prostitute, which led him to paint his first painting of a prostitute in Montmartre, a woman rumoured to be Marie-Charlet
29.
Amedeo Modigliani
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Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian Jewish painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. He is known for portraits and nudes in a style characterized by elongation of faces and figures, that were not received well during his lifetime. Modigliani spent his youth in Italy, where he studied the art of antiquity, there he came into contact with prominent artists such as Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brâncuși. Modiglianis œuvre includes paintings and drawings, from 1909 to 1914, however, he devoted himself mainly to sculpture. His main subject was portraits and full figures of humans, both in the images and in the sculptures, during his life, Amedeo Modigliani had little success, but after his death he achieved greater popularity and his works of art achieved high prices. He died at age 35 in Paris of tubercular meningitis, Modigliani was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Livorno, Italy. A port city, Livorno had long served as a refuge for those persecuted for their religion and his maternal great-great-grandfather, Solomon Garsin, had immigrated to Livorno in the 18th century as a refugee. Fluent in many languages, her ancestors were authorities on sacred Jewish texts and had founded a school of Talmudic studies, family legend traced the family lineage to the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. The family business was an agency with branches in Livorno, Marseille, Tunis. Modigliani’s father, Flaminio, was a member of an Italian Jewish family of successful businessmen, while not as culturally sophisticated as the Garsins, they knew how to invest in and develop thriving business endeavors. When the Garsin and Modigliani families announced the engagement of their children and he managed the mine in Sardinia and also managed the almost 30,000 acres of timberland the family owned. A reversal in fortune occurred to this family in 1883. An economic downturn in the price of metal plunged the Modiglianis into bankruptcy, ever resourceful, Modigliani’s mother used her social contacts to establish a school and, along with her two sisters, made the school into a successful enterprise. Modigliani was the child, whose birth coincided with the disastrous financial collapse of his fathers business interests. Amedeos birth saved the family from ruin, according to an ancient law, the bailiffs entered the familys home just as Eugenia went into labour, the family protected their most valuable assets by piling them on top of her. Modigliani had a relationship with his mother, who taught him at home until he was 10. Beset with health problems after an attack of pleurisy when he was about 11, when he was 16 he was taken ill again and contracted the tuberculosis which would later claim his life. After Modigliani recovered from the bout of pleurisy, his mother took him on a tour of southern Italy, Naples, Capri, Rome and Amalfi
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World War II
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World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945, although related conflicts began earlier. It involved the vast majority of the worlds countries—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing alliances, the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, and directly involved more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. Marked by mass deaths of civilians, including the Holocaust and the bombing of industrial and population centres. These made World War II the deadliest conflict in human history, from late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, and formed the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned and annexed territories of their European neighbours, Poland, Finland, Romania and the Baltic states. In December 1941, Japan attacked the United States and European colonies in the Pacific Ocean, and quickly conquered much of the Western Pacific. The Axis advance halted in 1942 when Japan lost the critical Battle of Midway, near Hawaii, in 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France, while the Soviet Union regained all of its territorial losses and invaded Germany and its allies. During 1944 and 1945 the Japanese suffered major reverses in mainland Asia in South Central China and Burma, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy, thus ended the war in Asia, cementing the total victory of the Allies. World War II altered the political alignment and social structure of the world, the United Nations was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts. The victorious great powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, China, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the Cold War, which lasted for the next 46 years. Meanwhile, the influence of European great powers waned, while the decolonisation of Asia, most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic recovery. Political integration, especially in Europe, emerged as an effort to end pre-war enmities, the start of the war in Europe is generally held to be 1 September 1939, beginning with the German invasion of Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. The dates for the beginning of war in the Pacific include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937, or even the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 19 September 1931. Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who held that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred simultaneously and this article uses the conventional dating. Other starting dates sometimes used for World War II include the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935. The British historian Antony Beevor views the beginning of World War II as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol fought between Japan and the forces of Mongolia and the Soviet Union from May to September 1939, the exact date of the wars end is also not universally agreed upon. It was generally accepted at the time that the war ended with the armistice of 14 August 1945, rather than the formal surrender of Japan
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Old Master
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In art history, Old Master refers to any painter of skill who worked in Europe before about 1800, or a painting by such an artist. An old master print is a print made by an artist in the same period. The term old master drawing is used in the same way, therefore, beyond a certain level of competence, date rather than quality is the criterion for using the term. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as A pre-eminent artist of the period before the modern, a pre-eminent western European painter of the 13th to 18th centuries. The term is used to refer to a painting or sculpture made by an Old Master. Les Maitres dautrefois of 1876 by Eugene Fromentin may have helped to popularize the concept, the collection in the Dresden museum essentially stops at the Baroque period. The end date is necessarily vague – for example, Goya is certainly an Old Master, the term might also be used for John Constable or Eugène Delacroix, but usually is not. The term tends to be avoided by art historians as too vague, especially when discussing paintings, although the terms Old Master Prints and it remains current in the art trade. Auction houses still usually divide their sales between, for example, Old Master Paintings, Nineteenth-century paintings and Modern paintings, christies defines the term as ranging from the 14th to the early 19th century. S. Master of Flémalle, Master of Mary of Burgundy, Master of Latin 757, Master of the Brunswick Diptych or Master of Schloss Lichtenstein
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Lucas Cranach the Elder
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Lucas Cranach the Elder was a German Renaissance painter and printmaker in woodcut and engraving. He also painted religious subjects, first in the Catholic tradition and he continued throughout his career to paint nude subjects drawn from mythology and religion. He had a workshop and many works exist in different versions, his son Lucas Cranach the Younger. Lucas Cranach the Elder has been considered the most successful German artist of his time and he was born at Kronach in upper Franconia, probably in 1472. His exact date of birth is unknown and he learned the art of drawing from his father Hans Maler. His mother, with surname Hübner, died in 1491, later, the name of his birthplace was used for his surname, another custom of the times. How Cranach was trained is not known, but it was probably with local south German masters, as with his contemporary Matthias Grünewald, there are also suggestions that Cranach spent some time in Vienna around 1500. According to Gunderam Cranach demonstrated his talents as a painter before the close of the 15th century and his work then drew the attention of Duke Friedrich III, Elector of Saxony, known as Frederick the Wise, who attached Cranach to his court in 1504. Cranach was to remain in the service of the Elector and his successors for the rest of his life, Cranach married Barbara Brengbier, the daughter of a burgher of Gotha and also born there, she died at Wittenberg on 26 December 1540. Cranach later owned a house at Gotha, but most likely he got to know Barbara near Wittenberg, where her family owned a house. The first evidence of Cranachs skill as an artist comes in a picture dated 1504, in 1509 Cranach went to the Netherlands, and painted the Emperor Maximilian and the boy who afterwards became Emperor Charles V. Until 1508 Cranach signed his works with his initials, in that year the elector gave him the winged snake as an emblem, or Kleinod, which superseded the initials on his pictures after that date. Cranach was the painter to the electors of Saxony in Wittenberg. His patrons were powerful supporters of Martin Luther, and Cranach used his art as a symbol of the new faith, Cranach made numerous portraits of Luther, and provided woodcut illustrations for Luthers German translation of the Bible. Somewhat later the duke conferred on him the monopoly of the sale of medicines at Wittenberg, Cranachs presses were used by Martin Luther. His apothecary shop was open for centuries, and was only lost by fire in 1871, Cranach, like his patron, was friendly with the Protestant Reformers at a very early stage, yet it is difficult to fix the time of his first meeting with Martin Luther. The oldest reference to Cranach in Luthers correspondence dates from 1520, in a letter written from Worms in 1521, Luther calls him his gossip, warmly alluding to his Gevatterin, the artists wife. He was also godfather to their first child, Johannes Hans Luther, in 1530 Luther lived at the citadel of Veste Coburg under the protection of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and his room is preserved there along with a painting of him
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Peter Paul Rubens
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Sir Peter Paul Rubens was a Flemish/Netherlandish draughtsman and painter. He is widely considered as the most notable artist of Flemish Baroque art school, the catalogue of his works by Michael Jaffé lists 1,403 pieces, excluding numerous copies made in his workshop. His commissioned works were mostly history paintings, which included religious and mythological subjects and he painted portraits, especially of friends, and self-portraits, and in later life painted several landscapes. Rubens designed tapestries and prints, as well as his own house and he also oversaw the ephemeral decorations of the royal entry into Antwerp by the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand in 1635. His drawings are mostly extremely forceful but not overly detailed and he also made great use of oil sketches as preparatory studies. For altarpieces he painted on slate to reduce reflection problems. Rubens was born in the city of Siegen to Jan Rubens and he was named in honour of Saint-Peter and Paul, because he was born on their solemnety. His father, a Calvinist, and mother fled Antwerp for Cologne in 1568, after increased religious turmoil and persecution of Protestants during the rule of the Spanish Netherlands by the Duke of Alba. Jan Rubens became the adviser of Anna of Saxony, the second wife of William I of Orange. Following Jan Rubens imprisonment for the affair, Peter Paul Rubens was born in 1577, the family returned to Cologne the next year. In 1589, two years after his fathers death, Rubens moved with his mother Maria Pypelincks to Antwerp, religion figured prominently in much of his work and Rubens later became one of the leading voices of the Catholic Counter-Reformation style of painting. In Antwerp, Rubens received a Renaissance humanist education, studying Latin, by fourteen he began his artistic apprenticeship with Tobias Verhaeght. Subsequently, he studied under two of the leading painters of the time, the late Mannerist artists Adam van Noort. Much of his earliest training involved copying earlier works, such as woodcuts by Hans Holbein the Younger. Rubens completed his education in 1598, at time he entered the Guild of St. Luke as an independent master. In 1600 Rubens travelled to Italy and he stopped first in Venice, where he saw paintings by Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto, before settling in Mantua at the court of Duke Vincenzo I Gonzaga. The colouring and compositions of Veronese and Tintoretto had an effect on Rubenss painting. With financial support from the Duke, Rubens travelled to Rome by way of Florence in 1601, there, he studied classical Greek and Roman art and copied works of the Italian masters
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The Descent from the Cross (Rubens)
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The Descent from the Cross is the central panel of a triptych painting by Peter Paul Rubens in 1612–1614. It is still in its place, the Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp, Belgium. The subject was one Rubens returned to again and again in his career and this particular work was commissioned on September 7,1611, by the Confraternity of the Arquebusiers, whose Patron Saint was St. Christopher. Although essentially Baroque, the oil on panel piece is rooted in the Venetian tradition, in its composition and use of light, the triptych recalls Caravaggios Roman period. One of Savior’s feet comes to rest on the shoulder of the Magdalene. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, placed midway on ladders so as to each other, form. The Virgin, standing at the foot of the tree, extends her arms towards her Son, Salome, kneeling. On the ground are seen the superscription and a basin where the crown of thorns. The crowd, always elated by the spectacle of torture, has departed from Golgotha as daylight fades, in 1794, Napoleon removed this painting and The Elevation of the Cross and sent them to the Louvre. After his defeat, they were returned to the cathedral in 1815, in addition to the original work for Antwerp, Rubens painted two other versions exploring the same theme. In Ouidas novel A Dog of Flanders the main characters Nello and it serves as the climax of the story, as they both sneak inside the Antwerp Cathedral on a freezing Christmas Eve to witness the beauty of the painting. The next day they are frozen to death in front of the triptych. Jaffé, M. Catalogo completo di Rubens, martin, John R. Rubens, The Antwerp Altarpieces - The Raising of the Cross and the Descent from the Cross - Norton Critical Studies in Art History
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Cathedral of Our Lady (Antwerp)
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The Cathedral of Our Lady is a Roman Catholic cathedral in Antwerp, Belgium. Todays see of the Diocese of Antwerp started in 1352 and, in Gothic style, its architects were Jan and Pieter Appelmans. It contains a number of significant works by the Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens, as well as paintings by such as Otto van Veen, Jacob de Backer. The belfry of the cathedral is included in the Belfries of Belgium, where the cathedral now stands, there was a small chapel of Our Lady from the 9th to the 12th century, which acquired the status of parish church in 1124. During the course of the century, it was replaced by a larger Romanesque church. In 1352, construction was begun on a new Our Lady’s church which would become the largest Gothic church in the Netherlands, in the beginning, it was to be provided with two towers of equal height. In 1521, after nearly 170 years, the new church of Our Lady was ready, the south tower reached only as far as the third string course. During the night of 5–6 October 1533, the new church was gutted by fire. The completion of the tower was therefore delayed, which led to its ultimate postponement. Moreover, the church only became cathedral of the bishopric of Antwerp in 1559 but lost this title again from 1801 to 1961, during the Iconoclasm of 20 August 1566, Protestants destroyed a large part of the cathedral interior. Later, when Antwerp came under Protestant administration in 1581, a number of treasures were once again destroyed, removed or sold. The restoration of Roman Catholic authority came in 1585 with the fall of Antwerp, in 1794 the French revolutionaries who conquered the region plundered Our Lady’s Cathedral and inflicted serious damage. Around 1798, the French administration intended to demolish the building but after each blow, in 1816, various important works of art were returned from Paris, including three Rubens masterpieces. And over the course of the 19th century, the church was restored and refurnished. Between 1965 and 1993, a restoration took place. At the beginning of the 15th century, the choir started developing an active musical life, and as a result. Johannes Ockeghem, one of the most important composers of the 15th century, served here as a vicar-singer in 1443, from 1725 to 1731 Willem de Fesch served as Kapelmeester followed from 1731 to 1737 by Joseph-Hector Fiocco. Lesser known, but locally important figures, such as Jacobus Barbireau and Andreas Pevernage, the churchs one finished spire is 123 metres high, the highest church tower in the Benelux
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Roger Fry
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Roger Eliot Fry was an English painter and critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting and he was described by the art historian Kenneth Clark as incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin. In so far as taste can be changed by one man, born in London, the son of the judge Edward Fry, he grew up in a wealthy Quaker family in Highgate. Fry was educated at Clifton College and Kings College, Cambridge, at Cambridge, Fry met many freethinking men who would shape the foundation of his interest in the arts. Alongside men like John McTaggart and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Fry was a part of the elite Conversazione Society, after taking a first in the Natural Science tripos, he went to Paris and then Italy to study art. Eventually he specialised in landscape painting, in 1896, he married the artist Helen Coombe and they subsequently had two children, Pamela and Julian. Helen soon became mentally ill, and in 1910 was committed to a mental institution. Fry took over the care of their children with the help of his sister and that same year, Fry met the artists Vanessa Bell and her husband Clive Bell, and it was through them that he was introduced to the Bloomsbury Group. Vanessas sister, the author Virginia Woolf later wrote in her biography of Fry that He had more knowledge, in 1911, Fry began an affair with Vanessa Bell, who was recovering from a miscarriage. Fry offered her the tenderness and care she felt was lacking from her husband and they remained lifelong close friends, even though Frys heart was broken in 1913 when Vanessa fell in love with Duncan Grant and decided to live permanently with him. After short affairs with artists as Nina Hamnett and Josette Coatmellec. She became his emotional anchor for the rest of his life, Fry died very unexpectedly after a fall at his home in London. His death caused great sorrow among the members of the Bloomsbury Group, Vanessa Bell decorated his casket before his ashes were placed in the vault of Kings College Chapel in Cambridge. Virginia Woolf, Vanessas sister, novelist and a friend of his as well, was entrusted with writing his biography published in 1940. As a painter Fry was experimental, but his best pictures were straightforward naturalistic portraits, in his art he explored his own sensations and gradually his own personal visions and attitudes asserted themselves. His work was considered to give pleasure, communicating the delight of unexpected beauty, Fry did not consider himself a great artist, only a serious artist with some sensibility and taste. He considered Cowdray Park his best painting the best thing, in a way that I have done, in the 1900s, Fry started to teach art history at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. In 1903 Fry was involved in the foundation of The Burlington Magazine, Fry wrote for The Burlington from 1903 until his death, he published over two hundred pieces of eclectic subjects – from childrens drawings to bushman art
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Omega Workshops
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The Omega Workshops Ltd. was a design enterprise founded by members of the Bloomsbury Group and established in July 1913. It was located at 33 Fitzroy Square in London, and was founded with the intention of providing graphic expression to the essence of the Bloomsbury ethos, the Directors of the firm were Fry, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Fry was keen to encourage a Post-Impressionist influence in designs produced for Omega, however, Cubist and Fauvist influences are also apparent, particularly in many of the textile designs. To ensure items were only for the quality of the work. The products were in expensive, and aimed at an exclusive market. A commission was taken to decorate a room for the 1913 Ideal Home Exhibition, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant produced designs for Omega, and Wyndham Lewis was initially part of the operation. This letter contained accusations particularly against Fry, criticising the workshops products and this split led to the formation not only of the Rebel Art Centre, but also of the Vorticist movement. A company in France was used to manufacture early printed linens, in the autumn of 1913 Fry, who also created the designs for Omegas tall cane-seat chairs, started designing and making pottery. The management of the Omega Workshop was passed to Winifred Gill from 1914 as the men started to become involved in the First World War, one artist exhibitions included those of Edward McKnight Kauffer, Alvaro Guevara, Mikhail Larionov and Vanessa Bells first solo exhibition in 1916. Edward Wolfe worked at the Omega Workshops, hand-painting candle-shades and trays, Wolfe, who died in 1982, was one of the last of the Bloomsbury painters. In January 1918, Omega were commissioned to design sets and costumes in the Israel Zangwill play Too Much Money, Omega closed in 1919, after a clearance sale, and was officially liquidated on 24 July 1920. A series of financial decisions and internal conflicts all contributed to its decline. At the time of its closure, Fry was the remaining original member working regularly at the workshop. Despite this, Omega became influential in interior design in the 1920s, a revival of interest in Omega designs in the 1980s led to a reassessment of the place of the Bloomsbury Group in visual arts. British art References Sources Christopher Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms, Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity. The Omega Workshop at the Tate Gallery
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20th-century art
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20th-century art—and what it became as modern art—began with modernism in the late 19th century. Nineteenth-century movements of Post-Impressionism, Art Nouveau and Symbolism led to the first twentieth-century art movements of Fauvism in France, Fauvism in Paris introduced heightened non-representational colour into figurative painting. Die Brücke strove for emotional Expressionism, another German group was Der Blaue Reiter, led by Kandinsky in Munich, who associated the blue rider image with a spiritual non-figurative mystical art of the future. Kandinsky, Kupka, R. Delaunay and Picabia were pioneers of abstract art, cubism, generated by Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, Gleizes and others rejected the plastic norms of the Renaissance by introducing multiple perspectives into a two-dimensional image. Futurism incorporated the depiction of movement and machine age imagery, parallel movements in Russia were Suprematism, where Kasimir Malevich also created non-representational work, notably a black canvas. The Jack of Diamonds group with Mikhail Larionov was expressionist in nature, dadaism preceded Surrealism, where the theories of Freudian psychology led to the depiction of the dream and the unconscious in art in work by Salvador Dalí. Detachment from the world of imagery was reversed in the 1960s by the Pop Art movement, notably Andy Warhol, Warhol also minimised the role of the artist, often employing assistants to make his work and using mechanical means of production, such as silkscreen printing. This marked a change from Modernism to Post-Modernism, photorealism evolved from Pop Art and as a counter to Abstract Expressionists. Media related to Modern art at Wikimedia Commons
39.
Bloomsbury Group
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This loose collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury, London, during the first half of the 20th century. According to Ian Ousby, although its members denied being a group in any formal sense and their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality. The male members of the Bloomsbury Group, except Duncan Grant, were educated at Cambridge at either Trinity or King’s College, most of them, except Clive Bell and the Stephen brothers, were members of the exclusive Cambridge society, the Apostles. In 1905 Vanessa began the Friday Club and Thoby ran Thursday Evenings, which became the basis for the Bloomsbury Group, thobys premature death in 1906 brought them more firmly together and they became what is now known as the Old Bloomsbury group who met in earnest beginning in 1912. In the 1920s and 1930s the group shifted when the members died. The Bloomsbury Group, mostly from upper middle-class professional families, formed part of an aristocracy which could trace itself back to the Clapham Sect. It was a network of an influential group of artists, art critics, writers. A historical feature of these friends and relations is that their close relationships all pre-dated their fame as writers, artists, except for Forster, who published three novels before the highly successful Howards End in 1910, the group were late developers. There were stable marriages and varied and complicated affairs among the individual members, Lytton Strachey and his cousin and lover Duncan Grant became close friends of the Stephen sisters, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Duncan Grant had affairs with siblings Vanessa Bell and Adrian Stephen, as well as David Garnett, Maynard Keynes, Clive Bell married Vanessa in 1907, and Leonard Woolf returned from the Ceylon Civil Service to marry Virginia in 1912. Cambridge Apostle friendships brought into the group Desmond MacCarthy, his wife Molly, the group met not only in their homes in Bloomsbury, central London, but also at countryside retreats. The Ascension Parish Burial Ground in Cambridge is the resting place of two of the Bloomsbury Group, Sir Desmond and Lady Molly McCarthy. It also houses nine other Apostles, including the philosopher G. E, Moore, who was a great influence on the Bloomsberries. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Hugh Walpole, another is Vita Sackville-West, who became Hogarth Presss best-selling author. Members cited in other lists might include Ottoline Morrell, or Dora Carrington, or James, through the Apostles they also encountered the analytic philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell who were revolutionizing British philosophy at the start of the 20th century. For Moore, intrinsic value depended on an intuition of good. For both Moore and Bloomsbury, the greatest ethic goods were the importance of relationships and the private life, as well as aesthetic appreciation. Bloomsbury reacted against current social rituals, the bourgeois habits, the conventions of Victorian life with their emphasis on public achievement, in favour of a more informal and private focus on personal relationships and individual pleasure
40.
Vanessa Bell
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Vanessa Bell was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and the sister of Virginia Woolf. Vanessa Stephen was the eldest daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Duckworth, the family, including her sister Virginia, brothers Thoby and Adrian, and half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth, lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Westminster, London. In later life she alleged that during her childhood she had been molested by her half-brothers, George. The Bloomsbury Groups first Thursday evening meetings began at Bells house in Gordon Square, attendees included, Lytton Strachey, Desmond McCarthy, and later on, Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant. She married Clive Bell in 1907 and they had two sons, Julian and Quentin, the couple had an open marriage, both taking lovers throughout their lives. Bell had affairs with art critic Roger Fry and with the painter Duncan Grant, with whom she had a daughter, Angelica in 1918 and her first solo exhibition was at the Omega Workshops in 1916. On April 7,1961, Bell died from an illness at Charleston. In 1906, when Bell started to think of herself as an artist, Vanessa was encouraged by the Post-Impressionist exhibitions organised by Roger Fry, and she copied their bright colours and bold forms in her artworks. In 1914, she turned to Abstraction, Bell rejected the examples of Victorian narrative painting and rejected a discourse on the ideal and aberrant qualities of femininity. Some of Vanessa Bell’s works were related to her personal life and she used her artistry to design and illustrate book jackets. Bell is one of the most celebrated painters of the Bloomsbury group and she exhibited in London and Paris during her lifetime, and has been praised for innovative works during her early maturity and for her contributions to design. Bells paintings include Studland Beach, The Tub, Interior with Two Women, and portraits of her sister Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Bell worked with Duncan Grant to create murals for Berwick Church in Sussex. Bell’s first solo exhibition in 1916 was held in the Omega Workshop in London, Bell became the director of the Omega Workshop around 1912 Design for Overmantel Mural, oil on paper. It depicts herself and Molly MacCarthy naked in Bell’s studio at 46 Gordon Square, street Corner Conversation, features massive nudes with their schematic form being related to it. Summer Camp, oil on board, was an illustration of the interchange of imagery between the artists working for the Omega Workshop. The origin of painting is when Bell went on a summer camp organized at Brandon on the Norfolk-Suffolk border near Thetford. Summer Camp became part of the Bryan Ferry Collection, by the Estuary, oil on canvas, shows how the geometrical abstraction that distinguished Bell’s design for the Omega Workshop was also applied in her easel painting. In her wartime paintings, landscape is rarely seen, however, this modestly scaled landscape shows her fondness for clarity of design in which segments of contrasting but harmonious colour are not distracted by detail
41.
Duncan Grant
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Duncan James Corrowr Grant was a British painter and designer of textiles, pottery, theatre sets and costumes. He was a member of the Bloomsbury Group and his father was Bartle Grant, a poverty-stricken major in the army, and much of his early childhood was spent in India and Burma. He was a grandson of Sir John Peter Grant, 12th Laird of Rothiemurchus, KCB, GCMG, Grant was also the first cousin twice removed of John Grant, 13th Earl of Dysart. Grant was born on 21 January 1885 to Major Bartle Grant and Ethel McNeil in Rothiemurchus, Aviemore, between 1887-94 the family lived in India and Burma, returning to England every two years. During this period Grant was educated by his governess, Alice Bates, along with Rupert Brooke, Grant attended Hillbrow School, Rugby where he received lessons from an art teacher and became interested in Japanese prints. During this period, Grant would spend his holidays at Hogarth House, Chiswick with his grandmother. He attended St Pauls School, London between 1899-91 where he was awarded several art prizes, between 1899/1900-1906, Grant lived with his aunt and uncle, Sir Richard and Lady Strachey and their children. When Grant was younger, he accompanied Lady Strachey to picture Sunday which gave him the opportunity to meet with eminent painters, Lady Strachey was able to persuade Grants parents that he should be allowed to pursue an education in art. In 1902 Grant was enrolled by his aunt at Westminster School of Art, while at Westminster, Grant was encouraged in his studies by Simon Bussy, a French painter and lifelong friend of Matisse, who went on to marry Dorothy Strachey. On his return, at the advice of Simon Bussy, Grant made a copy of the Angel musicians in Pieros Nativity in the National Gallery, Grant was introduced to Vanessa Bell by Pippa Strachey at the Friday Club in the autumn of 1905. From 1906, thanks to a gift of £100 from an aunt, Grant spent a year in Paris studying at the Académie de La Palette, during this period he visited the Musée du Luxembourg and saw, among other paintings, the Caillebotte Bequest of French Impressionists. In January 1907, and again in the summer of 1908, in 1908, Grant painted a portrait of John Maynard Keynes, who he had met the previous year, while the two were on holiday in Orkney. A year later, the pair would share rooms on Belgrave Road, in 1909 Grant visited Michael and Gertrude Stein in Paris and saw their collection that included paintings by, among others, Picasso and Matisse. In the summer, with an introduction from Simon Bussy, Grant visited Matisse himself, then living at Clamart, in November 1909 Grant moved to 21 Fitzroy Square - where he occupied two rooms on the second floor of the building on the west side of the square. A few doors away, at 29 Fitzroy Square, lived Adrian, Grant would later recall, a close friendship sprang up between Adrian Stephen and myself and I had only to tap on the window to be let in. The maid told Virginia that Mr Grant gets in everywhere, but very irregular as my visits were, they became more and more a habit, and I think they soon became frequent enough to escape notice. In June 1910, Grant exhibited with the Friday Club at the Alpine Club Gallery, during the summer of 1911 Grant was invited by Roger Fry to contribute to the redecoration of the dining room at the Borough Polytechnic. Grant composed two oil paintings to fit with the theme of illustrating London on Holiday, both his paintings, Football and Bathing, bear the influence of early Italian art and Byzantine mosaics
42.
Ernest Gambier-Parry
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Major Ernest Gambier-Parry OBE was a British military officer who participated in an expedition to the Sudan to avenge the grisly death of a renowned general in 1885. However, the wounds he sustained in that campaign ended his military career, Gambier-Parry was also known for his work as an author, musician, and artist. He succeeded to the manor at Highnam Court following the death of his half-brother Sir Hubert Parry, in addition, he preserved and archived the art collection that had been amassed by his father Thomas Gambier Parry, the masterpieces were eventually bequeathed to the Courtauld Institute of Art. Ernest Gambier-Parry, son of Thomas Gambier-Parry and his second wife Ethelinda Lear, was born on 25 October 1853 at Highnam Court, Highnam and his father was an artist, philanthropist, and art collector. His half-brother was the composer Sir Hubert Parry, Thomas Gambier-Parrys son by his first wife Anna Maria Isabella Clinton, another brother was the architect Sidney Gambier-Parry. Ernest Gambier-Parry was educated at Eton, where he studied under William Evans, by 1871, he had joined the Royal North Gloucestershire Regiment of Militia as a supernumerary lieutenant. He was promoted to lieutenant and, on 2 December 1874, Gambier-Parry became an instructor of musketry to the 2nd Battalion in 1880 and was at the Royal Citadel, Plymouth in 1881. He resigned as instructor of musketry on 22 August 1881, on 14 February 1883, he left the Royal Welch Fusiliers as a lieutenant, and joined the Devon Yeomanry, the Royal 1st Devon. On 12 February 1885, he was given the rank of captain in the army, the moments before Gordons death and beheading were portrayed in the painting General Gordons Last Stand by George William Joy. The Suakin Expedition was also an attempt to change the course of the Mahdist War, during the Eastern Sudan campaign of March 1885, Captain Gambier-Parry was seriously wounded. That military campaign in the Sudan was the subject of his published work Suakin,1885, in the preface to that book, he requested the indulgence of critics. On behalf of one who has carried a sword more often than a pen and he was appointed as a captain in the reserve of officers on 28 October 1885, and was subsequently promoted to the honorary rank of major on 7 May 1886 for his gallant conduct. He was invalided from the army and resigned his commission, during the First World War, he was commandant of No.6 Red Cross Hospital in Oxfordshire, the Goring Auxiliary Hospital. Gambier-Parry was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1918 and he was the president of the Gloucester Childrens Hospital that had been established by his father. He was also a Gloucestershire magistrate, Gambier-Parry had a strong interest in the arts. Not only was he an author, he was also a musician and he was a member of the Gloucester Committee of the Three Choirs Festival. He often exhibited his paintings at the Royal Academy and other venues, Gambier-Parry assumed the role of family archivist. He was reluctant to sell the collection of paintings and other art objects that his father had collected over his lifetime, the Gambier-Parry archive included an 1897 inventory of the estate that Ernest Gambier-Parry compiled and was used in the research of the collection for the Courtauld Institute
43.
Thomas Gambier Parry
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Thomas Gambier Parry, J. P. D. L. was an English artist and art collector. Gambier Parrys parents, Richard and Mary Parry of Banstead, Surrey, died when he was young and he was raised by his aunts and uncles. He was the nephew of James Gambier, 1st Baron Gambier and he was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. He moved to Highnam Court, Gloucestershire when he was 21 and, in 1839, he married, firstly, Anna Maria Isabella Fynes-Clinton, daughter of Henry Fynes Clinton. Only two of their six children survived to adulthood, Clinton Charles Parry and Charles Hubert Hastings Parry, in 1851, Gambier Parry married, secondly, Ethelinda Lear, daughter of Francis Lear, Dean of Salisbury, by whom he had six more children. Thomas Gambier Parrys father and grandfather were both directors of the British East India Company, and Gambier Parry devoted his wealth to good works. He adopted the principles of the Tractarian Movement, and was a prominent member of the Ecclesiological Society, Thomas Gambier Parry was a notable collector of medieval and Renaissance art, the Courtauld Institute was bequeathed his collection in 1966. He gained the reputation of a philanthropist, founding a hospital, orphanage, and college of science and art at Gloucester. He constructed the Church of the Holy Innocents, Highnam between 1849 and 1851 in memory of his first wife and those of his children who had died at early ages. Gambier-Parry adorned the whole of the chancel, including the roof and he is buried there in a tomb designed by his son Sidney. He started to lay out the Highnam Court gardens in 1840 and was one of the first to make a pinetum, Gambier Parry was a keen and versatile collector for most of his adult life. Many of his purchases were made on trips to the Continent, especially in Italy, but he bought from dealers and auctions in England. The Courtauld Gallery website shows images and descriptions of 324 objects from the 1966 bequest, some items, including two Van Dyck portraits and The Gamblers by the Le Nain Brothers, as well as a collection of stoneware ceramics, were excluded from the bequest and remained at Highnam. Earlier a few important items, mainly medieval ivories, had sold to pay death duties on the deaths of Thomas sons Hubert. The most significant of these are three ivories in the Victoria and Albert Museum and a reliquary that reached the National Gallery of Art in Washington via the Widener collection. All the objects mentioned below are included in the Courtauld bequest, there are two further predella panels by Lorenzo Monaco, and many other small panels by lesser-known masters. Later Renaissance works include ones by Il Garofalo and Sassoferrato, there are a number of illuminated manuscript pages from the workshop of the Boucicaut Master. The sculptures include three fine 15th-century marble reliefs of the Virgin and Child, the most significant of one by Mino da Fiesole
Temple
Charing Cross
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